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Pulitzer Foundation brings Herndon-Consagra on board

Photo by Kendra Paredes Hayden

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: July 15, 2008 - The move’s a short one in terms of geography – about three and a quarter miles as the crow flies. But Francesca Herndon-Consagra’s career move from the St. Louis Art Museum is a big one not only for one of the region’s most creative and capable art historians and curators but also for the forward motion of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

The foundation announced Tuesday that Herndon-Consagra will become senior curator, a new position. In it, she will work directly with the Pulitzer’s founder and chairman, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, and its director, Matthias Waschek, as well as with contemporary artists whose work will be featured in foundation shows to come.

“Pretty exciting isn’t it?’” she said in a joyful telephone interview on Tuesday afternoon. “I am truly looking forward to working at the Pulitzer Foundation. It is a smaller, more exploratory environment. In a sense, I am moving from a museum to a lab.”

At the Art Museum, Herndon-Consagra is curator of prints, drawings and photographs, and she has been a visible and innovative presence in that position. Her connoisseurship is impeccable; her exhibitions have ranged from searching and scholarly shows of Old Master prints and drawings to a brilliantly rambunctious exhibition of woodcuts by Missouri artist Tom Huck.

Her most recent exhibition is “The Immediate Touch: German, Austrian, and Swiss Drawings from St. Louis Collections, 1946–2007,” now on show in the Museum’s special exhibition galleries. 

Herndon-Consagra helped to create the extraordinary print study room in an aerie in the Museum’s east wing, in which works of arts on paper are made available to the public not only for the didactic and scholarly value of such an experiences but also for the genuine thrill of close encounters with the real McCoy.

“I have had lots of experiences,” she said. She is the daughter of the late Italian artist Pietro Consagra, and of Sophie Chandler Consagra, a former director of the American Academy in Rome. After graduating from Connecticut College, New London, Conn., and receiving advanced degrees from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she worked at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in its Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center; at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  She was also an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

She prefers, she says, smaller, more intimate environments such as the Pulitzer Foundation. “I think it stimulates a certain type of thoughtfulness, an environment in which the world of ideas is at the center.

“Three things attracted me,” she continued, “the opportunity to be creative; the opportunity to work with living artists and to work closely with the director and the founder on projects and installations. Continuing to live in St. Louis was an added plus. She said also that although the job is new to her, the city isn’t, and she is happy such an opportunity presented itself on home turf.

“I feel very strongly about St. Louis,” she said. She lives in the city with her husband, William Herndon, a teacher at St. Michael’s School, and her son, John Ray, a student at Crossroads School.

Waschek said the search process was open and systematic, and guided by several important criteria. Would an artist be excited to work with this person? Would the candidate fit into the non-hierarchical world of the Foundation? And would he or she be a good ambassador? Waschek said an important element of the new job would be to be a part of the Foundation’s work with the St. Louis Art Museum and Harvard University. “This is important for the next chapter of the Foundation’s work.”

Waschek said the job was advertised as being for a project curator. “We didn’t imagine we could get someone as accomplished as Francesca,” he said, “so we gave the job a more senior title.”

Herndon-Consagra will join the staff of the Foundation on Sept. 22.